Thank you for reading this blog. This blog is a work-in-progress "table of contents" of all the threads I have done on Twitter since I started doing Twitter in October of 2012.
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I like to do a "thoughts" post every once in a while, to look back on the time period covered by the Twitter threads I've linked to.
The threads from the time period below, early March through early May of 2018, mark a number of sort of big moments for me.
In mid-March of 2018, I was essentially bullied out of a consultant job I had been doing since mid-2017. I had driven a lot of success for the company, but, following the company essentially securing a multi-million-dollar round of funding, I had served my purpose, and was basically put at the mercy of a member of the company who did nothing except torture me.
This was done on purpose, and it was done to eject me from the company. It totally worked. It totally injured me physically, emotionally, and mentally. And it compromised my livelihood for a good six months.
At the same time, the situation inspired me to work a little bit harder to move out of the shadow of a group of folks through whom I'd gotten all of my consultant jobs. I spent most of the Spring and Summer of 2018 finding new clients and ended up in relationships that held pretty well, on and off, up until the pandemic shut the businesses down in March of 2020.
From March through May of 2018, I also found myself getting involved with politics in a number of ways I hadn't done in the past. This basically happened as a result of the 2018 caucus and my getting involved with the state-level assembly. Through that assembly, I became a member of the Central Committee of the Colorado Democrats. I spent about the next two years doing committee meetings, house district meetings, etc., on a somewhat regular basis.
This was great, in a lot of ways, as I got some insights into the party-politics process, as well as the political process as a whole, that I'd never had before. But I would say I also eventually exhausted myself on a lot of extroverted activities my introverted personality is not really cut out for.
And, additionally, even at a volunteering level, so much of politics, even in Colorado, is driven by somewhat selfishly career-minded folks. And I eventually became subject to a lot of bullying. But that wasn't until about late 2018 or early 2019.
If I'm not mistaken, the Twitter threads in the posts below mark the final times I visited any art galleries in person in Colorado. I may have attended some museums once or twice in 2019. But I'm pretty sure I didn't.
Art has been one of the biggest passions of my life. And, as I've mentioned many times before, from April of 2015 to April of 2017, I got involved pretty deeply in Denver's art scene through an art gallery in town. My involvement with the gallery coincided with the gallery re-attaining its success, after years of tragedy and struggle.
But I ended up getting set up, yet again, not long after the gallery really started finding its new success, being placed in the midst of a bunch of folks who bullied me. They bullied me out of the gallery. And they bullied me out of the Denver art scene.
I should really never have gotten as involved with the gallery as I did. That was my mistake. I was, more than anything, just overly excited to (I thought) have found friends. My involvement with the gallery ended up just messing up my ability to enjoy the arts in Denver in any capacity. And I finally had to admit that by about mid-2018 and stop visiting any galleries or museums in Denver at all.
Another big event around this time was FOSTA-SESTA. This was a bill passed by the US Congress in 2018 that potentially makes many different kinds of online activity a federal offense. The bill purportedly targets sex trafficking -- a nebulous term itself that basically means forced transport or forced labor in sex work -- online. But, for such a brief document, it actually targets any type of sex work online, and in such a way that it could construe adult services advertisements, or even erotic art, as contributing to sex trafficking in some way or another.
As I believe I've discussed before, I was already concerned with things like obscenity laws, laws that pretended to address youth exploitation, laws about prostitution, and laws about the age of legally recognized consent to sex. Through 2017, I tried to address a lot of these, among other, issues in my collage art as well as my stories, such as my amateur novel Summer Azure.
When FOSTA-SESTA really started to look like it was going to get passed, the first people who sounded the alarm on my Twitter timeline were workers (some of them trans men, by the way) in the porn industry. They said FOSTA-SESTA would limit freedom of sexual expression online. And they were right.
As I studied FOSTA-SESTA more and more, I came to understand the sex work industry -- i.e. prostitution. And I started to understand how much FOSTA-SESTA put the actual lives of prostitutes at risk. I also came to understand how hard sex workers were working to educate folks about sex work, as well as why laws like FOSTA-SESTA were bad.
So I ended up trying really hard to connect with folks in the sex work world, so I could assist with their efforts to repeal or neutralize FOSTA-SESTA, as well as decriminalize sex work. This probably ended up being a mistake.
Over the past three years, I've come to understand sex workers don't want partners as much as they want donors. I'm happy to be a donor. And I've given a lot of money to sex worker rights activists. But I do regret that I wasted a lot of time not focusing on the needs of, say, fetish artists like myself, so that I could try to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with folks who, quite honestly, will never accept or want me.
But, as you can see from some of the threads below, my initial, pre-sex work researches into FOSTA-SESTA had to do a lot more with how FOSTA-SESTA impacted freedom of sexual speech online in general. In particular, I'm proud of the work I did reaching out to free weekly papers to ask them how FOSTA-SESTA might affect their adult services advertising sections.
Finally -- I've put this "thoughts" post here, following Cinco de Mayo, for a reason.
After 2018's Cinco de Mayo, I started getting stalked in my neighborhood in a really bad way. I'm not totally sure what caused it. But immediately following my attendance of Cinco de Mayo in downtown Denver, people in my neighborhood began stalking me really bad.
So I do think that my attendance of Cinco de Mayo caused the stalking. But I'm not sure how. Some really strange people wouldn't leave me alone at the event. They followed me around while I was at the event. And the people who stalked me in my neighborhood afterwards acted strange in the same way.
At the same time, I think the stalking in my neighborhood may have been neighborhood-specific. At a meeting (posted below) that I attended in my neighborhood, Globeville, in April of 2018, one of the city officials there told me about folks in the neighborhood who are paid to go around the neighborhood and stop the Hispanic population there from being active.
The ultimate goal of this bullying is, the official told me, to disengage Hispanic folks from the neighborhood through misinformation and fear tactics, and then also, for the Hispanic folks who own property there, browbeat them into a situation where they're selling their land for low prices.
The official told me that these folks carrying out these misinformation and fear campaigns are actually paid by real estate companies, and that these kinds of campaigns had been happening for a while, but that since the results of the 2016 elections, the campaigns had gotten a lot worse.
I was really shocked to hear all of this, and I said pretty loud and clear that I would work really hard from then on to make sure the Hispanic people in my neighborhood got engaged in neighborhood life and that I'd make sure the real estate companies didn't win.
The stalking happened not long after that, and I've always wondered whether my statement at that meeting didn't have something to do with it.
I have been stalked in the past. And, when I've lived in places like apartments and duplexes, where I share a wall or ceiling with someone, I've also faced what I consider to be torturous amounts of noise, not to mention bullying and stalking in and out of the apartment complexes.
I know this sounds paranoid -- especially when I say how many different social settings this kind of stuff happens to me in. But the paranoia is offset in a lot of these situations by evidence (like video in some cases), by people outside these situations actually telling me what's happening to me, and by other situations I've watched where people are similarly stalked. Because this sort of social targeting, stalking, and harassment definitely does not happen just to me.
It should also be noted that, even before this time, a man from a set of duplexes across the way from my house would park his car in front of my house, then sit in the car for hours at a time, and sometimes for hours in the middle of the night. I have him on tape doing this. I also have him on tape trying to run over his girlfriend with his car in front of my house. He was eventually kicked out of the duplexes for causing other kinds of trouble.
Another aspect of the stalking was from my landlady's husband. Again, immediately after the 2018 Cinco de Mayo, my landlady's husband started staying in a small space on the property my house was on, almost twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week.
Not long before I moved into the house, in April of 2017, someone had moved out of that small space. My landlady said her husband was going to use the space for an art studio. And, over the course of the following year, the husband would come to the place every once in a while. We'd talk, on and off. The guy seemed pretty cool, in fact.
But, starting in May of 2018, the guy was there every single day, usually twenty-four hours a day. I also could not walk back into the backyard without the guy coming out and bothering me. If I left the house, the guy would leave 20 minutes later. When I'd come back, the guy would come back 20 minutes later. There was a definite pattern.
Things got to such an absurd point with this guy -- and I'll discuss it later -- that I couldn't even go into my backyard anymore. And, eventually, the guy started doing some really creepy things to me via text. And he started accusing me of really creepy stuff. He even started going down into the cellar of my house in the middle of the night and shouting curses at me (my bedroom was over the cellar). Eventually, in April of 2020, I had to leave the place. I couldn't take the harassment anymore.
But, again, all of that stuff really started happening immediately after the 2018 Cinco de Mayo. That day was really fun. But it ended up being a turning point for my life in a really dark and scary sort of way.
So those are some thoughts on the time frame the posts below make reference to.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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